1. The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove)

The angst-ridden, nameless communist double agent in Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Sympathizer, set just after the Vietnam War, has made his way to France in this smart new novel. Nguyen has a gift for transcending genre, so while his new novel is a satire of the French left, it is also a crime thriller bursting with ideas about colonialism, immigration, and revolution. Nguyen, winner of a Nelson Algren Literary Award for short fiction, has a beguiling talent for combining wordplay, distinctive characters like a Viet-Chinese drug lord, and deep, fundamental questions about identity in a way that is profound, yet entertaining.

2. Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia by Elizabeth Catte (Belt)

The author of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia now focuses on the deeply wrong eugenics movement in Virginia and its 1924 Sterilization Act and Racial Integrity Act. The sterilization of institutionalized patients (without their consent) and the prevention of interracial marriage, Catte argues in her persuasive and compelling book, reflected the state elite’s economic interest in controlling its citizens through its institutions. A particularly grim example was Western State Hospital, which became an upscale hotel after more than 1,700 were sterilized there, and its redevelopment enriched the privileged at the expense of immigrants, Black people, poor country people, and Native Americans.

3. You’re Leaving When? Adventures in Downward Mobility by Annabelle Gurwitch (Counterpoint)

Droll, self-deprecating Gurwitch is very funny – like Rhoda Morgenstern on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but delivering not so much one-liners or gags as stories that shift life’s viewfinder. Misadventures in the gig economy, fashions, wellness fads, and parenting might sink another writer, but Gurwitch’s wit, warmth, and generosity universalize them. “My kid entered college a music major,” she writes, and she “lost a son, but gained a gender nonbinary kid. The summer that Ezra got sober, they began identifying as a grammar-defying queer person, and I began relearning my pronouns one day at a time.” Onward, learning how to monetize the family nest, with a generous wit that’s welcome in this pandemic.

4. Vera by Carol Edgarian (Scribner)

The City by the Bay, leveled by the 1906 earthquake and fire, is vividly evoked in Edgarian’s engrossing saga, which features Vera, the teenage daughter of the madam of a notorious bordello frequented by corrupt politicians. Abandoned after the quake and left with nothing, Vera picks up her younger sister, makes an alliance with a former rival, and improvises a family to forge a path in this shaky new world. Edgarian enriches her novel by weaving in real figures, like tenor Enrico Caruso, as an ingenious Vera navigates a world sharply divided by affluence and poverty that exposes discrimination and injustice, requiring a special resilience to survive.

5. Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice by Bruce Levine (Simon & Schuster)

Historian Levine tells the story of one of the most ardent abolitionists in the U.S. Congress, a sarcastic Radical Republican who won the wrath of his colleagues, who saw him as a demagogue. Born into poverty in Vermont, Stevens developed a strong antipathy toward slavery and as a representative from Pennsylvania was chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee and vociferously advocated voting rights and citizenship for freed slaves. Stevens preceded President Abraham Lincoln, and then strenuously advocated for the impeachment of Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, but died during Reconstruction., before the pendulum swung back strongly away from his progressive views on race.